IN THE FOLLOWING ESSAY I GRAPPLE WITH THE QUESTION OF HOW HIP HOP TRANSFORMED FROM A PERFORMANCE-BASED GENRE TO THE RECORD-BASED GENRE WE'RE ALL FAMILIAR WITH NOW IN THE 21ST CENTURY....
The boys rush in through the front door, one of them carrying a small red plastic bag from Virgin Megastore. Laughing and talking with an excited loudness, the boys run into their room, directly pass their mother in the living room, and slam the door shut. There, they open up the bag containing their latest hip hop purchase, Nas’s “Hip Hop is Dead.” The CD cover is quickly torn free and the CD is put into the stereo. The boys sit on their bed, each holding onto opposite ends of the CD case as they both examine the booklet and all its contents, while listening to the music itself. Their gaze is only broken when their mother walks into the room and asks sternly, “Hey, hey, what’s all this noise about?”
The same disapproving motherly tone could be heard years earlier, in the room of similarly aged boys growing up with hip hop in the 70s. This time, the mother would be reprimanding her children for staying out so late, questioning them as to where they had been all this time; it was, in fact, five in the morning. Of course, she knew where they had been—to a party, dancing to the wee hours of the morning. When she finally left the room, exasperated and tired, the boys stayed awake discussing the cool songs they had heard played by the party’s master DJ, Kool Herc. There were sounds they had never heard before and they could barely sleep thinking about it all.
How has the focus of hip hop changed so dramatically over the last three decades? Has the CD or iPod become the focal point for hip hop, with current fans staring amazingly at the recorded piece or the iPod screen, instead of the stage with the performer on it? Being a hip hop fan in its early existence meant attending parties where one could watch DJs deconstruct familiar music to the most foreign-sounding material, where one could observe MCs and b-boys battling one another for the top spot till morning, and where one could respond to the MCs’ hollers and chants as they said them. Love Bug Starski, a DJ and MC during the peak of the Bronx hip hop scene, recalls his boyhood; “You know the way some people go to church to catch the Holy Ghost? That’s how I caught the Holy Ghost—at a party. That was my spiritual thing” (Fricke, Ahearn 141).
The element of live performance is not valued as much as it was in the days Starski was describing. Firstly, hip hop performance is valued at a much lesser degree commercially; current hip hop artists ride high on the Billboard charts, selling millions more than artists in other genres, but are simultaneously almost inexistent on the top-grossing concerts charts. Actually, at the end of 2003, 50 Cent had sold 6.5 million copies of his Get Rich Or Die Tryin album—making the album the top-selling one of the year—yet was ranked in the mid thirties on the list of top-grossing tours (NPR). It’s not only that hip hop shows are grossing sizably less than stars like Celine Dion and the Dave Matthews Band, but it’s also that the number of scheduled hip hop shows is meager in comparison with other genres. In fact, according to Yahoo Tickets, there are 53 remaining “Hip Hop/Rap” shows for the year 2007, while there are 226 remaining “R&B/Soul” shows this year, 300 for “Blues/Jazz,” 500 for “Country,” and 1,000 for “Rock/Pop” (Yahoo!). However, at the same time, seven out of the Top Ten singles on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, the last week of April 2007, are hip hop records. These startling numbers signify this transformation of hip hop to a record-based medium, as well as bring up the question of: where have all the hip hop performances disappeared to? The change has much to do with the introduction of gangsta rap in the late 80s and the reaction of the American public towards it. However, it’s important to realize that the shift didn’t occur in a vacuum and also involves the gradual changes in the advancement of recording technology and the general changes in the American cultural climate. A changing moment for hip hop was the release of Run DMC’s 1986 “Walk This Way,” a collaboration with rock group Aerosmith. The track marked a new fusion of genres and also brought hip hop to an even wider audience. In fact, Run DMC’s Raising Hell album, which contained “Walk this Way,” became the first rap album to go platinum (Palmer). This kind of exposure though, would also provide the landscape for hip hop to be seriously scrutinized. On top of that, media attention upon issues like gang violence and the spread of drugs in African American neighborhoods was increasing (Toop 164).
Interestingly enough, the group that hugely put hip hop on the mainstream map, was also the first to be put under the microscope for promoting the gang violence that occurred on their “Raising Hell” tour. The tour was met with much controversy after gang violence occurred outside of concerts in New York, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta; after the incident at the Pittsburgh show, Public Safety Director John Norton said, “The lyrics in the songs are provocative and pornographic. They incite violence” (Swenson). Controversy erupted even more after the Long Beach show, when gang violence prevented the show from even beginning; the Chicago Tribune later reported that, “300 gang members savagely attacked the audience with broken chairs” (Swenson). With a word like “savage” resonating in the backdrop one can imagine how quickly security measures at hip hop concerts increased.
With the “Together Forever” tour—headlining Run DMC and the Beastie Boys—came also a press release that informed the public of “crowd control barriers,” “walk-through metal detection units,” and a double barricade system between the stage and the audience (Racine).
The same story, yet with a different cast, retold itself in December 1992, when 60 gunshots were fired outside of an Ice Cube concert at Seattle’s Paramount Theater (Rosen). At this point, there wasn’t much in the media cheering on this musical genre. While in 1986, many newspapers reported with alarm in reaction to the Run DMC incident, there was an attempt to also explain the incident, contextualize it with facts about hip hop’s history; one writer explained how rap music’s “disc jockeys” were actually “collage artists, building turntable noises…or other sounds into clever arrangements” (Palmer). Another writer, while covering the Run DMC incident, called hip hop “the first biracial forum since rock,” and highlighted the 50-50 black-white ratio at a Beastie Boys concert (Racine).
Yet the language of the media was not at all apologetic or even impartial in the early 90s, in the wake of “gangsta rap” and the circulatory talks of censorship of hip hop. The New York Times published articles about gangsta rap’s detrimental effects on children (Hill 103). In 1995, the New York Times also published an article about hip hop titled “Lyrics From the Gutter”; the article denoted rappers as “artists,” with quotations around the word, and called for action against hip hop because the issue “is about forestalling America’s slide toward decivilization” (Bennett and Tucker). The next year, a 10-page story on Death Row’s chief executive, Suge Knight, was featured in the New York Times—actually headlined “There’s a Billion Dollars on Top of a Hill”—portraying Knight as a heavy, forbidding gangsta figure who managed a label which sold millions of records (Hirschberg).
With all the negative media on hip hop circulating throughout the early 90s, it was difficult to get any hip hop show on the road. Dr. Dre essentially cancelled his 1993 tour—it was “indefinitely postponed”—after seven shows because of “promotion problems,” according to the LA Times (Philips). Hip hop arena shows, like Dre’s, began disappearing because “insurance rates prohibited promoters from hitting the road, and bad press kept venue operators from buying into the few acts that tried” (Alexander).
One of the few acts promoters were willing to take upon was the House of Blues’ “Smokin’ Grooves” tour in 1996. Essentially, it was an urban Lollapalooza, headlining acts like the Fugees, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, and Busta Rhymes (Alexander). Though it was seen as a success for the state of hip hop performance—in fact, the tour repeated for three more years—in addition to being praised for bringing together a multi-cultural audience, the tour was also indicative of all the problems that were still facing the state of hip hop performance. The tour consisted of only one type of hip hop artist—the fairly non-threatening one. In addition, it seems as if this series of concerts was more of an isolated incident, simply a strategy to profit from hip hop short-term and not at all from a long-serving, mutual perspective. The fact that the tour was discontinued in 1999 is evident of that.
Also in 1999 came the hope for a new successful hip hop tour, the Ruff Ryders/Cash Money Millionaires tour—featuring acts like DMX, Eve, and Juvenile. However, when six people were stabbed backstage of a Boston arena show, the tour’s shows in Miami, Tampa, and Philadelphia were cancelled or postponed (Boucher). Again, the prospect of violence, immediately discouraged promoters from continuing their hip hop deals. Walter Howell, of Global Entertainment Insurance—which secures underwritings for concerts—explains the situation on an audio podcast, “If hip hop acts got publicity that a shoot-out happened next to their show, because there was a hip hop show there; you read that, you’re working as an underwriter insurance company, are you going to want to do a hip hop show? No!” (NPR). Howell explains further, “After a hip hop artist gets his first no, he will likely go to a competitor, but there’s a consolidation of insurance companies, and there aren’t too many competitors…insurance companies can deny coverage based on solid evidence or sheer whim” (NPR). With the current structure of the live industry, hip hop artists are really bereft of performance opportunities.
Besides hip hop’s denied access to big arenas, hip hop could neither flourish in the clubs of New York. This is a shocking fact, considering that uptown clubs in the 80s were booming. Kool DJ AJ, early hip hop DJ and promoter, says of club Disco Fever; “you could go there and hear the best DJs in New York” (Ahearn, Fricke 241). Sha-Rock, female MC of the hip hop group Funky Four Plus One, says, “That was the club where everybody went on a Friday or Saturday” (241).
In the May of 2001, DJ Funkmaster Flex of Hot 97 held a hip hop showcase at Manhattan’s Tunnel club. The Village Voice reports that “no other club night in the city has ever been subject to such strict police measures” (Owen). Yet, the prospect of violence in clubs was also a concern in the 80s; Art Armstong, who ran a club called Ecstasy, talks about how he had a crack security force and proudly states how he had no shootings or cuttings take place in his club (240). DJ Funkmaster Flex talks about how the chance for violence in the 80s was more probable than the chance in today’s club nights. He says, “There seems to be this concerted effort in the media and among the police to target hip hop as a menace to society…no matter what the press says, hip hop is less violent now than it was in the past. That’s because today, the hip hop DJ’s following is made up of individual consumers, not gangs and crews” (Owen). Either way, at Funkmaster Flex’s hip hop showcase, one must remove their shoes and pass through a metal detector before entering (Owen).
With the nature of such a live industry—one where promoters avoid hip hop shows like the plague, one with the consolidation of insurance companies, and one with high-level police control over clubs—hip hop artists have no other choice but to glue themselves to their recording studios. A combination of this denial of access to venues as well as the advancement in recording technology propelled hip hop artists to focus on their recorded material.
After “Rapper’s Delight” was released in 1979, hip hop culture became obsessed with the record. Grandmaster Flash says, “the game of hip hop changed. ‘Rapper’s Delight’ just set the goal to whole ‘nother level. It wasn’t rule the Bronx or rule Manhattan, or rule whatever. It was now how can you make a record” (Ahearn, Fricke 196). Later, in 1987, the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) was introduced, allowing recording artists an alternative to the analog tape. DAT made recording easier, offering reliability, low price, and digital storage capabilities (Audio Recording History).
Music journalist, Steven Ivory, points out that most hip hop acts “do not hone their talent on stage; they hone their talent in the studio (NPR). It seems that the obsession with the record that Flash was talking about never really wore off. However, it seems highly unlikely that the fervor for recording, stimulated by “Rapper’s Delight,” could fully sustain itself till today. It must be then that the current situation of live hip hop relates to bigger societal changes. Philip Auslander suggests, in his book Liveness that society has placed live performance secondary to “mediatized” forms of entertainment like television (Auslander 6). The various reasons for continued interest in performance, according to Auslander, is the appeal to all the senses—not just the visual and auditory that the television offers—and the sense of community that “emanates from being part of an audience that clearly values something you value” (55).
Even if television doesn’t offer use of all senses, it has become more interactive today—the prime example being a show like “American Idol” which asks viewers to determine the winners of the show. The power of hip hop in its early years was exactly this opportunity for interactivity; ordinary listeners were able to be a part of the creation process, through the live experience, and especially through features of the performance like call-and-response, rooted in Black tradition.
Secondly, “a sense of community” has changed to mean something totally different; community has been molded to mean virtual communities, in the age of Myspace, Facebook, Second Life, and the “Social Music Revolution” Last.fm. This doesn’t mean that individuals no longer have the drive to achieve community through concerts; it just means that their time has been diverted in pursuits of other, more convenient pursuits of community.
With a general audience preoccupied with other activities, as well as a live industry resistant to booking hip hop concerts, what should the hip hop industry do? Previously, the industry had reacted by strengthening its recording and production arm, almost giving up on the live industry, it seems. The cycle is disheartening: promoters don’t give performers a chance, performers turn to focus on recording, never developing their performance skills, further distancing promoters from hip hop performers. Ultimately, the cycle breeds an artist generation of unskilled performers.
In an attempt to revive the hip hop performance industry, Dave Chappelle of the “Chappelle Show,” along with Michael Gondry, the director of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, created the movie “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” (Wesley). Chappelle organized a free block party in Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood of Brooklyn with a significant history of its own. The concert comprised of performances by Kayne West, Mos Def, Erykah Badu, the Roots, Common, Big Daddy Kane, and Talib Kweli.
Though Chappelle deserves accolade for arranging such an event, this incident reveals the real problem with hip hop’s performance industry. This utopian concert was arranged by a comic, an outsider of the hip hop industry; there needs to be an infrastructure within the industry to support hip hop artists. That infrastructure can mean more schools devoted to developing performance skills within hip hop, as well as what Donnell Alexander of the Village Voice calls a “minor league system” of smaller clubs (Alexander). Just like the Beatles sharpened their performance skills, playing in small venues in London—watching the audience reaction’s to specific songs—hip hop needs the same infrastructure.
The interesting thing about all this is that hip hop artists are squeezed out of a lot of their revenue when releasing recorded material, specifically because of the revenue cuts that come from sampling songs. In addition, concerts for artists of other musical genres are the major source of their revenue stream. The potential revenue within the concert industry should be more appealing, one would think. With hip hop artists denied access to performing in arena venues, the hip hop industry needs to start from the bottom, and build its own infrastructure, outside of the Live Nation dominated live industry sphere.
The cultural force of live performance in hip hop in the early 70s and 80s seems light years away. To this generation, what Love Bug Starski described to be “his spiritual thing,” “his Holy Ghost,” merely induces this generation with a weird nostalgia of something we’ve never known or experienced, yet want to envision.
To delight our imaginations a little bit, perhaps next time “we” will be the mothers watching our children run excitedly into the house, absorbed in their own teenage world of music. Perhaps, we’ll even rebuke them for making too much noise or for coming home too late. Though, perhaps, secretly, we must be thinking: yes, this is a good sign.
- May 2, 2007
**Works Cited:
Ahearn, Charlie; Fricke, Jim. Yes Yes Y’All: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2002.
Alexander, Donnell. “Smoke and Mirrors.” The Village Voice. 6 Aug 1996: pg 55.
“Audio Recording History.”
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 1999.
Boucher, Geoff. “This Rap Tour is Really Smokin’: The Up in Smoke Lineup is Stellar.
But the Genre, a Dynamo in Record Stores, Does Not Have a Proven Track Record on the Road.” Los Angeles Times. 15 Jun 2000: Pg 6.
Philips, Chuck. “Dr. Dre Tour ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ After 7 Shows.” Los Angeles Times. 23 Sept 1993: F2.
Hill, Patrick B. “Deconstructing the Hip Hop Hype: a Critical Analysis of the
New York Times’ Coverage of African American Youth Culture.” Bleep! Censoring Rock and Rap Music, Vol. 68. Ed. B.H Winfield. Greenwood Press, 1999. 103-114.
Hirschberg, Lynn. “There’s a Billion Dollars on Top of a Hill.” New York Times 14 Jan
1996, natl. ed.: SM26.
Owen, Frank. “Hip hop Under Heavy Manners.” The Village Voice. 29 May 2001: pg 38.
Palmer, Robert. “Rap Music, Despite Adult Fire, Broadens It’s Teen-age Base.”New
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Pesca, Mike. “Black Music Acts on Tour” Podcast. NPR. 2 Sept 2003.
Racine, Marty. “Taking the Rap/Run DMC, Beastie Boys: Black and White and Shades of grey.” Houston Chronicle. 18 Jul 1987: Pg 10.
Rosen, Craig. “Violence Heats Up Outside Ice Cube Seattle Concert.” Billboard. 9 Jan
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Swenson, John. “Run-DMC Drawing Rapt Attention.” Chicago Tribune. 11 Sept 1986.
Toop, David. Rap Attack 3: African Rap to Global Hip Hop. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000.
Wesley, Morris. “Chappelle Throws a Jubilant ‘Block Party.’” Boston Globe. 3 Mar 2006: D1.
Yahoo! Tickets. (Search by Category.)
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